Great shots are just the beginning.
You’ve taken a great shot. Now you’re ready to make it even better. Aperture 3 gives you all the tools you need to turn your photography into so much more.
Import
Aperture 3 lets you get to work faster.
The fun begins even before you finish importing your photos. Double-click thumbnails in the Import window to view images, play videos, and hear audio files before they’re fully imported. If you’re on a deadline, you can begin adjusting an image even if it’s still being copied from your memory card to your Mac.
While the files are importing, Aperture 3 grabs data like shutter speed, aperture, lens, and focus points and starts sorting it right away. You can even add your own keywords and automatically apply an adjustment preset on import.
For extra flexibility, Aperture lets you store your images wherever and however you like — directly in Aperture 3, on external drives, or in their original folders. Choose to import RAW and JPEG images together or as separate images so you can work with them individually. The photos you import can also be added to your Photo Stream in iCloud.* And Aperture 3 can automatically back up your master images to a second drive during import.
Organize
Organize by Faces.
The popular Faces feature in iPhoto comes to Aperture 3, where it has even more power. As in iPhoto, Faces uses face detection technology to find faces in your photos. Once you identify a person, Faces quickly scans your library, or an individual project, to find more photos of that person. Let’s say you want to find photos of the bride’s father in the O’Rourke wedding project. Once you’ve identified his face in one photo, Faces finds other photos he appears to be in. You simply confirm the suggested matches to apply his name to those photos.
Faces
Organize by Places.
There’s no easier way to organize photos than with Places. Places converts location data from GPS-enabled cameras and geo-tracker devices into common location names. Then it displays those locations as pins on the Places map. If your camera doesn’t capture GPS data, you can assign locations by dragging your photos to the map. Later, when browsing your photos, just click the location pin on the map and all the photos shot there are instantly displayed.
Places
Organize any way you want.
Group your projects by year or organize them in hierarchical folders to bring order to even the largest photo library. Add descriptive keywords and other metadata, then use the powerful Aperture search engine to find photos based on almost any criteria.
Organize
Your Photo Stream takes care of itself.
Your Photo Stream in iCloud is a rolling collection of your last 1000 photos, ready to view whenever you want with a single click. Once your photos have been imported from your Photo Stream into your library, you can edit or rearrange them any way you like. You can choose to have all the photos in your Photo Stream imported to your Aperture library automatically, organized by the month and year they were taken. Or turn off auto-import to manually move the photos you want, when you want.
Learn more about Photo Stream
Compare and Select
Browse photos full screen.
Use every inch of your beautiful Apple display to make selects and compare images side by side. Browse your photos at high speed, instantly navigating between projects. When it’s time to make selects, use ratings, flags, and colour labels to organize your best shots. Use the Loupe to examine detail, or zoom and pan multiple images at once.
Compare and Select
Perfect and Enhance
Perfect and Enhance
Adjustment presets.
Dozens of ready-to-use adjustment presets let you apply professional-style imaging effects to a single photo or across an entire project. Quick Fix presets can take care of common problems including blown highlights and low contrast. Other adjustment presets apply processing techniques and styles, such as a toy or vintage camera look. You can also create your own adjustment presets or import presets from colleagues. And since all adjustments are nondestructive, you can revert back from the changes you make at any time or even restore your original master images.
The Zoom Navigator displays a thumbnail to help you move around a zoomed image, so it’s even easier to find and perfect details.
Precision brushes.
Nondestructive brushes let you make selective adjustments to specific parts of your image without creating masks or layers. Control brush size, softness, and strength while you dodge and burn or apply effects such as blurring, skin smoothing, and polarization. Fifteen Quick Brushes handle the most common touch-up jobs with a few strokes. Detect Edges makes it easy to retouch areas with greater accuracy — deepening the colours of a mountain range, for instance, while leaving the sky untouched.
Share
Custom multimedia slideshows.
Create impressive multimedia slideshows with photos, custom titles, HD videos, and layered soundtracks. It’s as easy as dragging your photos and videos into one of the themed slideshow templates in Aperture. If you want a more customized slideshow, you can choose the Classic or Ken Burns theme and control transitions, background and border colours, and the font, size, and style of your titles. Sharing slideshows is simpler, too. Aperture exports your slideshows to iTunes so you can sync them to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, then share them anywhere.
Export. Easy.
When you’re ready to share your photos, you can send them to Flickr or Facebook with a couple of clicks. Or take advantage of a variety of export plug-ins to upload photos directly to sites including SmugMug, iStockphoto, and PhotoShelter. Because Aperture is integrated with the OS X Media Browser, you can easily include photos from your library in iLife or iWork documents. Or make them “to go” by syncing them to your iPad, iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV.
Print Products
Your book. Made to order.
Create and order premium-quality photo books right from Aperture. You have the tools and professional book templates to design books in small, medium, large, and extra-large 13x10-inch formats. Use one of the 11 themed templates, or customize a template by adding, removing, and resizing text and photo boxes to create a one-of-a-kind book. For a professional touch, all hardcover books come with a full-bleed, satin-finish cover with a wraparound dust jacket.
New book themes.
Aperture 3 includes two new book themes: Photo Essay, a simple, elegant, photojournalist-style layout; and Journal, which includes scrapbook-style borders and large spreads.
Travel maps.
Use either of the new themes to illustrate your photo books with customizable maps, showing the locations of any or all the photos in your book. If it’s a book of your travels, you can drop in a map that uses the location data stored with your photos to map your journey.
Making Books
Printing prowess.
You have many printing options with Aperture 3. Customize the margins, crop on the fly to match the aspect ratio of your paper, and add borders in custom widths and sizes. Create a sheet of wallet-size prints or passport photos. Take advantage of the colour-managed print engine for reliable colour rendition. Adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness to fine-tune your images. Add metadata to large prints or contact sheets with your choice of font, size, and style. Include watermarks or your own header — including a logo — on every printed sheet. And when your settings are just the way you want, save them as a preset for future prints.
